Galway was one of my favorite teachers!
He is no longer alive, but I will always love him forever and ever.
GRAVITY
By Galway Kinnell
1
Upon the black hole Cygnus X-1 that wobbles
as if boffed by an invisible companion,
upon a silk stocking the color of bees
rolling itself up down a leg, upon the soft dip
over the clavicles, which accept only tongued kisses,
upon the tongue that slowly drifts
into the other’s mouth and chats
there with her opposite number,
gravity exerts the precise force needed.
2
In the wings of the Eskimo curlew
flapping through the thin air of the Andes,
in the sacral vertebrae of the widow
who stoops at the window to peer
behind the drawn blind, in the saggy skin
under the eyes of the woman
who is in love with a man incapable
of love, who lives on in the heaviness
of emotional isolation, in the lavish
cascade of urine the rhino releases,
in the mouthwater of the child who waits
in shriek position for the dentist,
in the scradged skin dangling in shreds
from the children who lurched toward
the Nakashima River screaming, as if this were
the single aria they had ever rehearsed, gravity
shudders at its mathematical immensity.
3
As long as two kvetches remain alive,
because inside each is self-hatred so hardened
not even nonexistence can abide them,
as long as the hummingbird strikes
the air seventy-four times per second,
as long as the mound of earth remains heaped
beside the rectangular hole waiting to be filled,
gravity cannot be said to impose its will.
4
If the pilot ejects one second too late,
if the condemned man shrinks at seeing
the trapdoor give way, if the man who stands
with fire at his back and a baby in his arms
hears the near neighbors cry,
“Drop her! Don’t worry! We’ll catch her,”
if the juggler gets behind in her count
and the bright object flies past the spot
where the other hand was to snatch it,
gravity cannot pause to rectify matters.
5
When a deer kenning us stands immobile,
and for one moment we know we exist
entirely within her thoughts, when cichlid fry,
sensing danger, empty their air bladders
and drop to the river bottom like pebbles,
when the snow goes and millions of leaves
reveal themselves pressed down over the contours
of earth to create her hibernation mask,
when a person in a military cemetery
among grave markers that spread to all the horizons
understands that all of existence has been destroyed
again and again, when depression after mania
causes clock hands to stick and days to crawl,
when the full moon’s light creeps across a sleeper
calling to her atavistic soul, when a soldier,
who has always known life is imperfect,
is wheeled to another hopeless attempt
at surgery—but, this time, resolves
to sleep and not wake again until such time
as time begins again—then gravity
grips us to the earth, and crosses its fingers.
6
In the case of the last ancient trees at Ypres
still turning out their terrified wood,
in the case of the concertina wire
hurled out in exuberant spirals and set down
between rich and poor, in the case of the howls
that fly off the earth through madhouse windows,
in the case of the word “heavenly”
when we remind ourselves that earth,
too, was a heavenly body once,
in the case of the numeral keys
totting up the number of humans
humans have killed, in the case of the man
who strays into a gravitational field where
the differential between the force on the scalp
and the force on the foot sole will stretch him
into an alimentary canal thin as a thread,
in the case of the child who has upset
his ink bottle while doing homework
and quickly snaps both arms down
to halt the lateral gush of the black juices,
gravity, if it could, would recuse itself.
